Weekend Warrior Part 1

With all the craziness of life as of late, I have not taken much time off. I figured it was high time that was remedied, a close friend of mine agreed. My requirement was only that we go somewhere warm, as Washington has had a rather wet and dismal summer season thus far.

My companion suggested Eastern Oregon, as it has similar weather but a highway I had not yet traveled via the Columbia River Highway route (I-84). We only had a weekend to work with. So this sounded like a fun adventure, so off we went.



So we left Lacey and headed towards Portland Friday evening. On the way to I-5 we spotted some hitchhikers with a Portland sign. We picked them up since we were headed straight to Portland. Molly and Kallum had come from Australia and were hitchhiking the states. Molly is an expat and vagabond from California and Kallum is an Australian native.

Molly and Kallum made the drive to Portland speed by pretty quickly. My dog, Riley (a shih tzu) found them interesting and almost immediately ended up in Molly's lap in the back seat. It was nice to chat with them about traveling, vagabonding and other such things. Running into other travelers is always a good time.

After that we hit a little place for dinner in Portland that my companion suggested, Bubba Bernie's, as he had a craving for cajun. I got a pulled pork sandwich and he got a shrimp po boy that was spicy and delicious!

We drove on through Oregon and it started to get dark. What was neat about the drive was that we were able to see Multnomah Falls at night. We took the old Columbia River Gorge highway through this portion and it was breathtaking, even at night.

At this point we were pretty tired. As we were in a Subaru station wagon, we planned to sleep in the car. So we were searching for somewhere to boondock for the night. I received a bonafide high five by utilizing google maps on my phone to locate a gem of a location, Quesna County Park. There were outhouse style toilets, a boat launch and free camping. It was perfect.